We are family: A brief language

history of the Germanic family

 Sprechen Sie
Deutsch?

Why study German?

German is:
* (an) official language of –
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg,
Liechtenstein and Belgium
+
* native language of populations in:
Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, France,
Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, Romania,
and other parts of Europe
German is spoken by 120 million people
in Europe as their mother tongue.
That’s a quarter of all Europeans!
Startling similarities between English and German

Lexical similarities:
German English
Mann man
Maus mouse
singen sing
Gast guest
grün green
haben have
Vater father
A little less obvious lexical similarities

German English
Pfeffer pepper
Herz heart
liegen lie
lachen laugh
Hund ‘dog’ hound
Knecht ‘servant’ knight
Weib ‘woman’ wife
Zeit ‘time’ tide (notice ‘eventide’)
Grammatical correspondences between German and
English

Formation of comparative and superlative forms

German English
dick thick
dicker thicker
(am) dickst(en) thickest
Irregular comparative and superlative patterns

German English
gut good
besser better
(am) best(en) best
Verb system: past tense of regular verbs

German English
lachen-lachte laugh-laughed
hassen-hasste hate-hated
lieben-liebte love-loved

Irregular forms:
German English
denken-dachte think-thought
bringen-brachte bring-brought
Vowel allophony (ablaut) in strong verbs

German English
singen-sang-gesungen sing-sang-sung
geben-gab-gegeben give-gave-given
fall-fiel-gefallen fall-fell-fallen
How do we account for these similarities?
Option 1: These two languages have, at some
time in the past, borrowed heavily from one
another (or that both of them have borrowed
heavily from some third language).

This has happened in the history of English

before – case in point, relationship between
English and French since the Norman
Invasion of England in 1066

crown country people baron color war

peace officer judge court crime marry
religion altar virtue beef pork joy
Difference in the English-German and English-
French relationships

English (by in large) only borrowed vocabulary

forms from French and not general grammatical
patterns

Correspondences between English and German

are all encompassing (lexical and grammatical)

Conclusion: Option 1 is a bust

Let’s try another option…
Option 2: We may speculate that, at some time
in the distant past, the ancestors of English
and German were merely dialects of the same
language.

Differences in the modern languages (i.e.,

English and German) are due to changes (e.g.,
lexical borrowing, sound changes, grammatical
paradigms, word order (syntax), etc.)
Proto-Indo-European (PIE)
Dates back to 2500-2000 B.C.E.

Geographically: located for the most part in the lands

that extend from India to Europe

12 major divisions: Albanian, Armenian, Baltic,

Celtic, Germanic, Hittite, Indic, Iranian, Italic,
Slavic, Tocharian,

Important note: We have no attested written

documents in PIE. The PIE language is a
“reconstructed” proto-form (usually indicated with
a star - *dagas (days))
Linguistic reconstruction – The
comparative method:

When two languages can be traced back to a

common ancestor language, we say that they are
genetically related.

Relationships: Proto/Parent language

Daughter language/dialect

Related words are referred to as cognates.

The Comparative Method

An example
OE OHG ON Gothic ModE
fæder fater faðir fadar father
fōt fuoz fótr fôtus foot
þrīe drî þrír þreis three
þú dû þú þu thou
cūðe konda kunna kunþa could
ōðer andar annarr anþar other

Question: What is the relationship between /d/ and

/þ/? Which is the proto-form?
Verner’s Law (con’t)
>> had the accent on the syllable immediately
preceding *p, as in the examples below:
IE *pətér > Gothic fadar “father”
IE *népôt > ON nefi “nefi”

On the other hand, those *p’s that eventually

became German b where those that had NOT
stood in initial position and that had not had the
accent on the immediately preceding syllable, as
in the example below:

IE *sep(t)m > Gothic sibun “seven”

IE *upéri > OHG ubar “over”
Linguistics, Archeology, and History

Language groups should never be confused with

ethnic groups.

The Indo-Europeans appear to have been organized

into rather small groups or clans, based on the fact that
there is no widespread cognate with the constructed
meaning “king” (though a word for “clan chieftian”
does exist).

Heavy reliance on hunting and animal husbandry for

food; metals were virtually unknown.

Reconstructed cognates for “winter” and “snow”

suggest the Indo-Europeans didn’t live too far south.
The Germanic Tribes
The weight of the evidence points to an ancient
homeland in modern Denmark and southern Sweden.

“Battle-ax Culture” from roughly third millennium

B.C.E.

Only at a relatively late era is there evidence about

the Germanic people that is neither linguistic nor
archeological. About 200 B.C.E. Greek and Roman
historians wrote about the Germanic tribes.

Runic inscriptions – after the second half of the

second century, we have written evidence from the
Germanic peoples themselves.
Völkerwanderung
We may reconstruct a gradual splitting-up of the
Germanic people and their languages, along with a
migration southward out of their original homeland in
southern Scandinavia.

By 200 B.C.E., Germanic tribes had apparently spread

across the area show below (see map), from northern
Belgium in the west to the Vistula in the east, and
south as far as the upper Elbe.
5 Distinct Groups
North Germanic – remained mostly in Scandinavia

East Germanic – (Gothic) East of the Oder, and

spread along the Baltic Coast

West Germanic – west of the Oder, and spread out

as far as modern Belgium

Istvaeones (Weser-Rhein Group)

Irinones (Elbe Group)

Germania – Roman historian Tacitus (98 A.D.)